The reputation of John Nott, who has died aged 92, will for ever be linked with the Falklands war of 1982. Nott was the defence secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s first administration and was extremely fortunate politically to survive one of Britain’s gravest postwar crises – yet it effectively ended his ministerial career.
Although the British taskforce retook the islands from Argentina after just 10 weeks’ occupation, Nott could not escape responsibility for his part in the government’s earlier decisions to reduce the islands’ protection, which had convinced the generals in Buenos Aires that they could launch their attack with impunity. Nor did he ever live down his ill-disguised pessimism about the taskforce’s chances of success. From being one of the Tories’ rising rightwing hopes and a prospective future chancellor, he left parliament for good a year after the war, with a knighthood; he was never awarded a peerage.
